1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of calculations on numbers performed by computer means. The present invention more specifically relates to the performing of an operation of integer division type.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
An example of application of the present invention is the processing of digital images and, more specifically, calculations performed on image blocks in fractal coding. In such an application, the image is divided into overlapping blocks and different calculations are applied to the values (levels of grey or color levels) of the different digitally-coded pixels. A specific operation which is frequently performed in digital image processing and which requires significant calculation resources is division. Such a division is used, for example, to perform mean value or variance calculations on pixel blocks.
The present invention more specifically applies to the performing of division in iterative operations, that is, division for which at least part of the result of a preceding division is used again for the current division. Such is the case, for the example of application to image processing, for which the fact of having overlapping blocks leads to operations involving operation results concerning a preceding block.